Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication such as voice, data, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., bandwidth and transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems. Typically, a wireless communication system comprises several base stations, wherein each base station communicates with the mobile station using a forward link and each mobile station communicates with base station using a reverse link.
A wireless communication system may employ multi-carrier modulation for data transmission. Common examples of multi-carrier modulation include orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and discrete multi-tone (DMT). OFDM effectively partitions the overall system bandwidth into a number of orthogonal subbands. Each subband is associated with a respective carrier upon which data may be modulated. The carriers for the subbands may be independently modulated with data, and the modulated carriers are then added together to generate an output waveform.
OFDM transmissions have several fundamental parameters that must be known or must be detectable by user devices (terminals) to enable demodulation of the OFDM signals. Some of the parameters should be tuned to match the specific deployment characteristics of a network to enhance performance. While it may be possible to perform “blind detection” of the settings by terminals in the network, this is difficult or expensive (in terms of computation, power, delay, etc.) process for the terminal.
Thus, there is a need for a system and method to provide fundamental parameters of the OFDM modulation to terminals outside the OFDM modulation to enable such network flexibility, and to enable terminals to quickly and easily gain access to the OFDM modulated data transmissions.